by: Alex Valdes | CNET
Welcome to the dot-si boom? Less than two weeks after President Donald Trump declared that the US was officially renaming “artificial intelligence” to “super intelligence,” the domain extension .si has become a hot item around the world.
Elon Musk, who’s regained his trillionaire status, said he was renaming his AI company SpaceXAI to SpaceXSI, its second name change in less than three months.
Meanwhile, the central European country of Slovenia, whose official domain extension is .si, has registered more than 10,000 .si domain names every day since Wednesday. Slovenia allows anyone to obtain a .si domain name — you don’t have to live in the country. Coincidentally, First Lady Melania Trump is a native of Slovenia.
A domain extension, or top-level domain, is the set of letters after the final dot on a website address. Typically, these suffixes indicate the theme of the website, such as .gov for government, .edu for schools and .org for nonprofits, but there are country-specific domains as well. The most common extension is .com, followed by China’s .cn and Germany’s .de, according to digital services company CentralNic Reseller.
Web hosting provider Hostinger told TechCrunch that .si is now its second-most-popular domain extension after .com and that more than half of buyers are in the US and India.
Behind the .si surge
Trump announced in his speech to the UN on Sept. 22 that the US would begin using “super intelligence” to refer to AI in all official documents, saying, “The use of the word ‘artificial’ makes intelligence sound fake. It is not fake. It’s actually amazing.”
In a subsequent executive order titled Inaugurating the Era of Super Intelligence, Trump wrote that the new term “more appropriately captures the promise, potential, and rapidly advancing capabilities of these technologies.”
On Sunday, Trump announced his Super Intelligence Force, led by National Intelligence Director Jay Clayton. The small task force, Trump said, will focus on engagement with consumers, public interest groups, religious organizations, critical infrastructure providers and AI companies.
Trump was only 11 years old when the term “artificial intelligence” was coined in 1955 by computer scientist John McCarthy, who defined AI as “the science of making machines do things that would require intelligence if done by humans.”
Companies around the world have reacted to Trump’s announcement, scooping up .si domain names for future branding purposes. Other people are grabbing them with the idea that they could resell them to companies that want them.
The domain name AI.si is now up for sale at nearly $700,000.
Register.si, Slovenia’s national registry and management platform for .si, says there were more than 46,000 domain registrations in September, a more than 15-fold increase from the 3,515 in August. The .si domain launched in September 2025. Register.si, run by the Academic and Research Network of Slovenia, charges registrars (like Hostinger) only about $11 per domain, which adds up to more than $300,000 in September.
Anguilla, a British territory in the Caribbean Sea, reaped more than $85 million last year from over 1 million registrations for the domain extension .ai, which the country controls.
Another Musk rebrand
Over the weekend, someone called X Freeze asked Musk on his social media site X (formerly Twitter), “Any possibility of renaming to SpaceXSI??,” to which Musk responded, “Yes, we will make that change.” As of this writing, the company is still listed as SpaceXAI on social media platforms and on its website.
In July, Musk renamed xAI to SpaceXAI after it was absorbed by the aerospace company in a $250 million acquisition in February. The company owns and operates the Grok chatbot and other Grok models and tools.
Ever since being admittedly fascinated by the Cambridge coffee webcam from the 1990s, I’ve written about VPNs, the NFL, smartphones, living wages, over/unders and everything in between. See full bio